Now Reading: Party Frock by Noel Streatfeild

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Journey

Right now I’m in the middle of Party Frock by Noel Streatfeild.

According to a website on books by Streatfeild, Party Frock was published in 1946 and the US edition in 1947 was called Party Shoes.

Now, it is only available as Party Shoes in the UK. It is no longer in print in the US. Fun facts, huh??? =)

I bought my copy from the used bookstore at the Chowrasta Bazaar in Penang. I wished I remembered the year I bought this book. I’m guessing it’s some time in 2009. Yeah, and I’m only reading it now!






But I think I have quite a special edition of the book. It’s not in perfect shape. In fact, pages began falling out when I began reading it last week. Now I’m torn between (no pun intended) giving away the book or keeping it for myself after I finish reading it. My copy, published in Armada Lions in 1971, is titled Party Frock, and as we know now, Party Frock is no more in print! This means my copy is sort of valuable, right??


So far I’ve only read two books by Streatfeild – Ballet Shoes for Anna and White Boots. I initially did not think I would enjoy reading Party Frock because of the book’s miserable condition. But it has since become quite a little page-turner.

It is unbelievable how seven children (Selina and her six cousins) plan to hold a pageant just because Selina received a frock and satin shoes from a godmother in America. It is mostly because there would not be any other suitable occasion to wear the frock as it was in the middle of the Second World War and times were hard.

But the children are as optimistic as ever. They still intent to go ahead and plan a pageant that involves a number of their neighbours in the village.

I’m at page 118 or 53% into the book now. Can’t wait to see how the pageant turns out!

If you have read this book before, let me know what you thought about it! =)

Now reading: The Cardturner

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading is hosted by Book Journey.

Now reading: The Cardturner by Louis Sachar

Last read book: Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont

What I plan to read next: I have no idea! Any recommendations?

Just finished reading a mystery!

I woke up this morning to finish reading the last few chapters of Written in Blood by Sheila Lowe. It was only like four chapters left last night but I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore even though it was one of exciting parts! Oh well. Check out my review of this book on my other blog!

Like what I mentioned in my review, it's not all blood and gore in the story. I don't really know why such a title was picked either. But yeah, you can expect from the book a whole lot of mystery, suspense and a romance thrown in. Quite a quick and engaging read.

Now, what do I want to read next? Give me a moment. I'm gonna get up and walk over to the bookshelves.

...and I'm back. I picked out Dead Girls Don't Write Letters by Gail Giles. I bought this book around two or three years ago on eBay. Just now I was visiting the blog, Presenting Lenore and she mentioned this book in one of her posts. So I have decided to read this today.

Now reading: The Struggle by L.J. Smith & book fairs

The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening and The Struggle by L.J. Smith

I'm actually reading the second book, The Struggle right now. I've already read and reviewed the first book, The Awakening in July. I've also finished watching the entire Season One of the TV show of The Vampire Diaries. This is one reason why:

Haha!

For fans of the TV show, you could check out this blog, Vampire Diaries Guide for all you need to know about the show. I just stumbled upon it and well, they have interesting stuff to offer fans. There are widgets such as calendars, banners, jigsaw puzzles (!!!) and picture makers among others.

Hmm, I would really like to watch Season Two...

Anyway, the Times Book Clearance is back in Island Plaza, Penang! 

And for those staying in the mainland, don't miss out on the bookstore Popular's Book Fair in Megamal Pinang.

Now reading: The Korean Palace of Honolulu

It's Monday! What are you reading? is a weekly event hosted by Book Journey where bloggers gather to share what they have read this past week and what they plan to read this week.

Now reading:

The Korean Palace of Honolulu by Linda Mi-Suk Enos
Published: May 29, 2008 by Lulu.com (first published 2008)
Paperback, 440 pages

Yesterday, I reviewed The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger.

So, what are you reading now? :)

Now reading: The Devil Wears Prada

It's Monday, What Are You Reading? is hosted by Book Journey.

Now reading:

The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
Published: October 6th, 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd (first published 2002)
Paperback, 391 pages

Yesterday, I also finished reading The Awakening, Volume 1 of the Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith. Haven't written my review yet, and I'm gonna write it now!  :)

Anyway, today I received a copy of Someone Like You by Sarah Dessen in the mail. I won it from a contest held at A Severe Book Addiction!

So, what are you reading?

What I'm reading today

It's Monday! What are you reading? is a weekly event hosted by Book Journey where bloggers gather to share what they have read this past week and what they plan to read this week.

Book completed last week: Collision of Evil by John J. Le Beau




Book I'm now reading: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Emily Dickinson was wild!

I am currently reading The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn. Below is the press release for it:

One of the most versatile American writers alive, Jerome Charyn has written about gangsters, homicide detectives, Broadway musicals, the American Revolution, and ping-pong. Not content to rest on his laurels, Charyn tackles his most difficult, elusive, and shocking subject yet—one of the most mysterious in all American letters—the inner life of a nineteenth-century Massachusetts homebody.

The daring and unlikely match-up of writer and subject makes THE SECRET LIFE OF EMILY DICKINSON: A Novel [W. W. Norton & Company; February 22, 2010] crackle with an energy rarely felt in an era when authors feel increasing pressure to write on subjects close to their own biographies or professional specialties. Ironically, though, Charyn is closer to the essence of Dickinson, whose own subject matter ranged far beyond the confines of her experience, than many a critic or biographer hunting for an interpretive key to her work has ever come.

“It was the old maid of Amherst who lent me a little of her own courage to risk becoming a writer,” Charyn writes in his author’s note, and he recovers an essential aspect of Emily that overly erudite interpretations often obscure—her courage, not in violating established verse forms, or even in setting pen to paper at a time when few women did, but in facing with humor a life whose every day was a frighteningly blank page. Charyn charts the entirety of Emily’s life—from her girlhood to her death—a life of which her literary career, which she herself tried to keep confined to an “invisible sphere,” was only one small part.

This re-imagination of Emily’s life in her own voice follows a very factual line. Charyn vividly portrays Emily’s family members from her domineering father to her meekly invisible mother, to her ever more distant brother, whose creative spark abandons him after marriage. But he also introduces fictional characters who represent broader social realities. Charyn, with a craft honed through decades of experience researching and re-creating a multitude of milieus, recovers the essential strangeness of Emily’s world. An institution like the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary—rarely remarked on by Emily herself but fully imagined here—could exist, where young women were superbly educated for reasons often obscure even to their parents and preceptors, yet still had few rights of their own.

This is the world of a nation on the brink of war, where the social unrest of the cities is about to boil over and even spill into country towns like Amherst. This is a world of madhouses where petty thieves are shackled and made to wear leather masks. This is a world where genteel college fraternity boys out drinking are more dangerous than pickpockets and army deserters, and where a heretical Yale scholar is more likely than a would-be rapist to find himself ruined and on the run from the law.

When one of Emily’s secret suitors, Reverend Wadsworth, removes his gloves, it is to reveal hands “as red and rough as claws”—souvenirs of a childhood spent in a manual labor camp “little better than a jailhouse.” This rough-and-tumble nineteenth-century America that Charyn realizes was not nearly so remote from the polite world of letters as we might imagine. At different stages of Emily’s life, she brushes hands with the haunting and alluring figure of Tom, the Holyoke handyman, a lower-class picaro and a representative of the entire evolving, unstable outside world (beyond the “population of readers”) against which the poetess continually redefines herself.

Charyn’s Emily is first and foremost a creator—not a lesbian, not a frustrated lover, and not a child—but someone with the imaginative power to perceive the world as one in which all things remain somehow possible, in her fifties no less than in her adolescence, whether she is being courted or facing debilitating illness. Charyn has spent countless hours not only with Dickinson ’s poems but also with her letters, “wherein she wears a hundred masks.”

Near the conclusion of Charyn’s novel, Dickinson grits her teeth through an interview with Carleton West, a collector of her verses who has rummaged in many an attic. When the ardent West says that Emily’s poems are his life’s work, the spinster pointedly remarks, “Then it cannot be much of a life.” The gift Charyn has given us is the realization that Emily Dickinson’s genius is not confined to her verse, but must be sought in her whole life, through which she remained uncompromisingly true to herself—a feat no less difficult in late nineteenth-century New England than it is today.

About the author:
The author of 38 other books, Jerome Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and has received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937 and lives in New York and Paris. Entertainment Weekly wrote that his previous novel, Johnny One-Eye: A Tale of the American Revolution, now available in trade paperback, belongs in the “great British tradition of picaresque novels,” and according to a starred review in Publishers Weekly it “deserves to be spoken about in the same breath as E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.”

TITLE: The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel
AUTHOR: Jerome Charyn
PUBLICATION DATE: February 22, 2010
PRICE: $24.95 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-393-06856-6

So, have you read it yet? If yes, please leave me the links to your reviews. Thanks!

The reading journal a book lover should have

A reading journal is what I need and my prayers have been answered. Sourcebooks have sent me this book for review which you can check out at my other blog. :) Below is the press release for the book.

Read, Remember, Recommend by Rachelle Rogers Knight
New and Improved Interactive Reading Journal Helps Book Lovers Organize their Favorite and Future Literary Experiences

It is late at night and you have just finished another great book. What a feeling! The characters, themes and fascinating settings are still fresh in your imagination. Questions and thoughts swirl into your mind. Does this author have another book? Which member of my book club would enjoy this story? What am I going to read next!

Book lovers, also known as bibliophiles, are looking for a one stop shop to keep track of their reading and they can find it with Read, Remember, Recommend: A Reading Journal for Book Lovers (Sourcebooks, 9781402237188, April 2010) by Rachelle Rogers Knight. A self-published hit, RRR is the ultimate organizing resource for book lovers.

The journal features 60 cross-referenced lists of literary awards and notable picks, including Pulitzer, National Book Award, and 100 Best Books of the Century. RRR also offers more than 2,500 suggestions to help readers discover great literature and new authors. Users can record books read, jot down thoughts and ideas, and keep track of recommendations, books borrowed and loaned, and book club history.

Unlike anything on the market, Read, Remember, Recommend keeps readers coming back to bookstores to purchase recommended books and urges users to spread their joy to other book lovers.

Rachelle Rogers Knight is a passionate reader who has enjoyed books her entire life. Rachelle self-published Read, Remember, Recommend and Read, Remember, Recommend for Teens in 2007, and earned the Bronze Medal for “Independent Publisher of the Year” from Independent Publisher Online Magazine in 2008. Sourcebooks, Inc. is releasing new and improved editions of the self-published hit this April. She recently re-launched her website www.bibiliobabe.com, an amazing blog and resource for book lovers.

Now reading: The Catcher in the Rye

It's Monday and I'm in the middle of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.  Sadly, the literary world recently lost one of its celebrated authors as Salinger passed away at the age of 91 on Jan 27, 2010.  An article on him was published in The Star newspaper. I haven't read it yet...therefore, I'm sort of bookmarking it here!

Anyway, I'm actually reading the novel as it's one of the required readings in my English class. I had the novel a long time but haven't read it yet. So now's the chance for me to bring down my stack of TBRs, which never seem to reduce.

Check out the various covers of the novel below.  I'm not sure of the years they were published but I do know that the red one (most right) was the first edition cover!  And it's being reprinted.  I prefer it much more than the boring white one I have now.

Simply modest cover

Actually, I'm only halfway through Chapter 3. During class, the lecturer mentioned that Holden Caulfield suffers from a mental illness and can never stick to one topic during the narration of the story. He is also known to use crass language and likes to call some people phony. He's a pretty colourful character, so I'm really looking forward to the rest of the book.

This post is part of the weekly event, It's Monday! What Are You Reading? It used to be hosted by J. Kaye but now the new host is One Person's Journey Through a World of Books.

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing!

I'm reading this book right now. Below is the press release for it:

Where Life Is a Dance and Disco Is a State of Mind

In Her Latest Novel, Queen of Boomer Lit Allison Bottke Offers Mature Women Contemporary Fiction with an Attitude!

With over seventy-eight million baby boomers alive today, a demand for women’s fiction that deals with age-appropriate issues has grown exponentially in recent years. Out of the ever-increasing number of novelists that feature characters in their 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, best-selling author Allison Bottke has distinguished herself as a true “queen” of boomer lit.

Allison has launched her new Va-Va-Va Boom series, published by David C Cook, where vibrant, successful fifty-somethings share laughter, tears, and advice as they pop into each others’ lives via the Internet—and the airlines! Brought together in an online community known as Boomer Babes Rock, Susan, Patricia, and Mary form a fast friendship, even though they live in different parts of the country and lead completely different lives.

“My boomer babe characters are fun, fashionable, funky, and faithful women who are following the dreams of their hearts,” Allison says. “I want to provide readers with enjoyable fiction about sassy and seasoned women achieving dreams, not complaining about their aches and pains. I also want to provide an honest but positive look at long-term marriage.”

In You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, the first book in the Va-Va-Va Boom series, Susan Anderson owns and operates a hip hair salon on the Las Vegas strip, decorated with her collection of disco memorabilia accumulated decades ago when she was one of the beautiful people on New York’s disco scene. Now happily married, Susan is known for her business savvy, her fabulous vintage ensembles, her faith, her big heart—and the impromptu disco dance numbers salon staff and clients join in when the spirit moves. If life is a dance, Susan’s mastered all the moves.

But an exciting business opportunity, her husband’s impending retirement, and her 50th birthday rock her world, shaking Susan’s foundation and revealing regrets and painful memories she thought she’d dealt with. Will Susan be able to face her past, reinvent her marriage, launch a new dream . . . and keep on dancing?

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing by Allison Bottke
David C Cook/June 2009/ISBN: 978-1-434799-49-4/437 pages/softcover/$14.99
http://www.davidccook.com/ ~ http://www.boomerbabesrock.com/

I won a CD (!!!) and who's Jenna Fox?

It's been a while since I listened to the radio so I stayed in my room and tuned in to Red FM 107.60. The deejay was inviting listeners to send in an SMS for a chance to win Taylor Swift's special edition album, Fearless (Platinum Edition, CD & DVD) which contains the songs Love Story and You Belong With Me. And since my phone was next to me, I thought what the heck and sent in my SMS. (Kinda cheesy songs but I like the lyrics and the beat).

Guess what? My phone rang a few minutes later and the radio deejay told me I'd won the exclusive album! Well, he didn't announce it right away. He asked if I had won anything from the radio station in the past 30 days and I said no. Then he asked for my details, said something like congratulations and I heard my voice on radio some 15 minutes later.

Now I can't wait for the CD to arrive so that I can listen to the rest of Taylor Swift's songs. I have two of her songs on my phone too.

*** *** ***

I'm also currently immersed in The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson. It's kind of an easy and quick read - I'm on page 72 now. It's about a 17-year-old girl, Jenna Fox who was supposedly in a coma for one and a half years. She woke up not remembering anything about her life before the deep sleep. Her mom is weird and her grandma is even weirder. Jenna strongly feels that they are hiding a very important secret from her.

Um, I'm guessing that the story is kind of futuristic? Correct me if I'm wrong.

The story is written from Jenna's point of view so as a reader, we are in the dark along with Jenna who's trying to figure out who she really is. It's a story of discovering one's identity.

I like this paragraph from page 49:

I am out the door in seconds. I am going to school. Tomorrow. I hurry down the walkway. Will Mother change her mind? I glance over my shoulder to make sure she is not following me. Freedom. It feels as crisp and breezy as the open sky. But then I remember her pale face. Her tentative decision. My pace quickens. Distance is my savior. I flee from my closed world into one I haven't met yet.

The last sentence is my favourite.

Anyway, notice the short sentences? There are lots of them in the book so it makes reading kind of choppy. But so far so good. I'd love to find out what skeletons Jenna's parents and grandma are hiding in their closets, so I'm gonna continue reading it now.

What Are You Reading? (Oct 19, 2009)

Skin and Other Stories by Roald Dahl

What I'm Reading Now

A new weekly event and hosted by J. Kaye! It's called What Are You Reading On Mondays? I came across it while browsing through The Eclectic Reader's blog.

So, the question is: what am I reading this week?

Two books. Fearless #1 by Francine Pascal and Lovers and Strangers Revisited by Robert Raymer.




I discovered the Fearless series from the school library during my secondary school years. And was instantly hooked by it. Now I'm hoping to collect all the books in the series - all 36 of them.

For those who haven't heard of it before, it's about a teenage girl, Gaia, who's born without the fearless gene. She's specially trained in several forms of martial arts and can take down a group of men who dare try to fight her. Well, she's not afraid of anything so she's happy going out for a stroll in the middle of the night hoping to run into a criminal lurking in the dark. It would be a bad experience for the guy then.

As for the book, Lovers and Strangers Revisited, it's a collection of short stories written by university lecturer Robert Raymer. They are written with Malaysian elements incorporated in them which makes it all the more interesting. It has also been voted most popular in the Popular-The Star Readers’ Choice Awards 2009. Reading this book will certainly help me in writing a short story for my creative writing class.

What I'm Reading Now?

Yesterday I finished reading a book, which was sent to me by Tracee Gleichner from Pump Up Your Book Promotion. The title of the book was Mo' Dirty: Still Stuntin' by Darrell King. Click on the title to read my review of it.

It's the first of its kind that I've read. It's categorized under the Urban Fiction genre. I visited Wikipedia last night and found out that books in the Urban Fiction genre are mostly full of street or gangsta language, like what you hear in rap songs!

I'm not sure if I like it because it's hard to read and decipher what the characters are trying to say. It's full of bad words you wouldn't want your child to be reading. I'm also guessing that feminists might be against such books which also make women seem like mere objects. The guys also seem to be only interested in money, obtaining the best drugs, and deciding on which girl to sleep with each night.

But then, it's been an interesting read. I'm always open to different kinds of books. Each book is a unique reading experience and I'd like to try them all if I have the time.

Nevertheless, last night I started reading 'Where Rainbows End' (or Love, Rosie or Rosie Dunne in the US) by Cecelia Ahern. Ahern is certainly a talented writer as she can certainly write good stories that can make the reader keep going. I was so engrossed in the book until 2.30 a.m., well past my bedtime. In fact, I was still fully awake at that time and would love to continue reading but I'd better sleep as I've to wake up early this morning.

This is what the book's about (taken from MPH Online):

"Since childhood, Rosie and Alex have stuck by each other through thick and thin. But they're suddenly separated when Alex and his family move from Dublin to America. Rosie is lost withoout him. Then, just as she is about to join Alex in Boston, she gets life-changing news - that will keep her at home in Ireland."

Currently Reading...

50 Ways To Hex Your Lover by Linda Wisdom! I've just started Chapter 3. What's the story about? Well, it's about a witch who was banished to Earth. She's also in love with a vampire and vice versa but they have problems in their relationship.

I have to get started on reading for exams too. Exams are only a few weeks away and I wonder if I have time to read EVERYTHING, which seems incredibly impossible actually. Hah, never mind. I'll only read what I like to read. In short, I'll only read what I can.

Spanish class tomorrow. For a while, I've been struggling with my Spanish as it's become more difficult. But now I understand the way it works and when to use certain verbs and all. Tomorrow I hope my teacher will let me go off early as I have a copywriting workshop to attend!